In bringing The Sims to the GameCube, EA makes the best selling PC game of
all time available for us console lovers. After all, it only seems fair that a
good PC game should make its way over to the consoles since we’re sent Grand
Theft Auto 3 and Splinter Cell their way. So how did we do in this recent
“trade?” Well I think the PC guys did get the better deal overall, but we did
get something pretty good ourselves...
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| Sims getting in a sim-workout |
If you’re new to The Sims and wondering what it’s all about, I gotta ask
where the heck have you been for the last three years! But after that I will say
that it could best be described as a “life simulator.” Think about MS Flight
Simulator where you control all of the different aspects of a plane. You need to
worry about things like air speed, altitude, angle of decent, fuel, bring up the
landing gear, and all sorts of stuff like that.
Now instead of controlling a plane, think of controlling a person. Now you need
to worry about happiness, jobs, friends, buying a home, hunger, and even whether
you need to go to the bathroom or not. That, in a nutshell, is The Sims. Yet, it
is even more as you’ll soon find out...
In The Sims you create your own little “Sim” and start to live in his or her
world. It becomes your direct responsibility to provide your Sim with all the
good things in life to make him or her happy, and to avoid as much of the icky
stuff as possible. As in real life this can all sound rather overwhelming, and
at first it may very well be. But in a relatively short amount of time you and
your Sim should be having a blast. The Sims for the GC plays in a lot of ways
like its PC sibling, but with a couple of welcome additions and modifications.
The most useful is the “Get A Life” mode. This is a goal-based version of the
more free-form “Play The Sims” mode. The Get A Life mode is a great way to get
accustomed to the controls and also to get an understanding of what you actually
need to do in order for your Sim to be happy and for it to advance in life.
There are many different chapters in this mode, each with a set of goals that
you need to accomplish in order to advance to the next chapter. For example, you
may need to get a promotion in your job or show your decorating skills and add
some style to your pad before you can go to the next level. You can look at the
Get a Life mode as kind of training for the much more open-ended “Play the Sims”
mode. In this mode there are no goals to speak of. In fact there is really no
end to the game. It’s possible that some may be turned off by this lack of
finality, and in some ways that’s understandable. I think that in the console
world we like to know when we’ve accomplished our goals so we can move on to the
next great thing. Maxis, the developers, understood this and that’s one reason
for the Get A Life mode. So, you see, you get the best of both worlds!
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